Like many of you G1 fans, I grew up in the 1980s and 90s, when the kids toy aisles were dominated by GI JOE and Transformers. Yet a new toy was coming to change the entire way we played, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). It's hard to believe, but Nintendo was synonymous with gaming in the 1980s and early 1990s. Sega had not shown up to challenge it with its 16-bit Genesis, and Atari's desperate attempts to compete with their 5200 and the 7800 were pitiful at best. Unless you had a PC, Nintendo meant video games and vice versa.
Now, a lot of franchises had at least one Nintendo video game. Franchises like the Flintstones, The Incredible Crash test dummies, Indiana Jones, Star Trek, Tiny Toons, the jetsons, the Simpsons, Felix the cat, Spiderman, X-men, Robocop, Batman, Star Wars, and many more franchises had games on the NES. Heck, TMNT had 4 games on the NES and GI JOE, Hasbro's other big property, had two games itself! So why wasn't there a Transformers game on the NES? Well, there was, sort of. There were actually two G1 Transformers games released for the Nintendo in the 1980s, but both of them were only released in Japan for their Nintendo Famicom, which was their version of the NES.
The first game, which is probably the most well known of the two games, was called Mystery of Convoy. It was released in 1986 as regular Famicom cartridge game, and is known for its extreme difficulty. You play as Ultra Magnus, making your way through various levels, trying to avoid seekers, and other Decepticons blasting you. You can transform at any time, and will need to do so every now and then to proceed.
Eventually, you make it to the boss fight, which most of the time is a giant Decepticon logo. However, you do fight Bruticus, Menasor, Megatron, and Trypticon as bosses as well.
The game, while probably the best G1 Transformer game of the 1980s, could have used some tweaks, like a life bar that allowed you to take more than one hit would have made the game much more enjoyable. Still, the game never was published in the US, and only found its way over here via emulation and Famicom importers. You can check out the full gameplay below:
The second G1 game, called Transformers: The Headmasters, was released the following year in 1987 in Japan for the Famicom disk system. For those not aware, the Famicom disk system was an add-on disk drive for the Famicom that allowed it to play disk-based games instead of the usual cartridge based games we were all used to playing. This was necessary at the time to keep up with demand for games, as the cartridge games required computer chips that were in short supply at the time. Lots of notable game series were released his way in Japan, such as Zelda 1 and 2, Castlevainia, Super Mario Bros 2, Kid Icarus, and Metroid to name a few! I suspect that Transformers: The Headmaster isn't well known due to it being one of the nearly two hundred Disk System games instead of a cartridge.
You unlock a few Transformers by rescuing them in the levels. The are two types of levels. One where you play in Vehicle mode, blasting things as you drive or fly along the surface of each world, with each transformer having a different alt mode and different firing angles.
The second level type has you in a generic robot mode, that looks nothing like any Transformer, going underground while blasting various things in locked rooms to go to the next room until you reach a boss, who is just a color pallet swap of a generic character.
Then at the end, you and your rescued Autobots will all jump inside Metroplex, and fight Scorponok.
It's not that great of a game. In fact, if you told me that it was originally a different IP altogether and made into a Transformers game like they did with Super Mario Bros 2, I would believe you. As very little in this game has to do with Transformers. For example, I could swap seven art assets out of the game and it would no longer be a Transformer game. I can definitely see why they left this one in Japan.
Check out the full gameplay below:
While we did get a couple of G1 Transformer games on early PCs like the Commadore 64 in the US, none of them are really that great. In fact, it wasn't until many years and many attempts later that we would get a Transformers game in the US that was better than Mystery of Convoy. However, that is a different story for another time...
